


cards are unclear

by cestmabiologie



Category: Carnivale
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-17
Updated: 2018-03-17
Packaged: 2019-04-01 08:25:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13994364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cestmabiologie/pseuds/cestmabiologie
Summary: Sofie meets her true self in the shed and tries to piece together her identity through visions and memories.It's time for her to choose.





	cards are unclear

**Author's Note:**

> Sofie had a major character development dropped onto her in the season finale of a cancelled show. The show never addressed her place within the world of Carnivàle and subsequent fan speculation and critical essays did not spend tons of time developing her potential. This is my attempt to piece together clues about Sofie's morality from her actions and memories. I tried to write around the show's mythology so it might be readable for people who haven't seen the show (and who don't care about spoilers).
> 
> I care a whole heck of a lot about Sofie.
> 
> Additional Warnings: references to violence on the show

**I**

 

It is time for Sofie to choose. She can’t explain how, but she knows this to be true.

Like she knows the lick of fire.  
Like she knows the burn of a body worked past its limits.  
How to scrub blood stains out of cotton.  
Never to enter rooms without invitation. She knows that now, too.

Sofie doesn’t know how to get out of a locked shed with her hands bound.

**II**

 

This is what Sofie knows: _keep the curtains drawn._

Because the parlour needs to feel like a different world from outside.  
Because Sofie has no business looking out the window.  
Because light can be tricky, sunlight especially.

The light that slashes into the room when the curtains aren’t closed looks dense enough to touch and feel the dust motes swirling against her palm like a storm. She imagines that the dust storm trapped in the sunlight speaks to a dust storm trapped inside her chest. When she cuts the beam with her fingers, she casts shadows on the table. She makes shapes.

The sun and shadows feel like nothing. Inside Sofie, it feels like a lot.

There is a hole in one of the curtains, just big enough for her to fit her smallest finger through up to the second knuckle (she knows this because she’s tried. She’s been very careful not to make it worse by trying.)

She plans to sew it closed, as a gift, but Mama says her hands are too young to do a tidy job. Nevermind that she’s told Sofie that she will never grow up to be the sort of woman who could handle fine work like sewing.

There is a row of small, uneven stitches along the hem of Sofie’s nightdress that hasn’t proven Mama wrong yet.  
  
There are other rules for readings:

 Listen to Mama. Only say what she says.  
 Don’t lie.  
 Don’t turn and talk to Mama. People don’t understand. It’s too much. They get scared.  
 Respect the cards.  
 Listen to Mama.  
_Listen to Mama._

 “I know,” Sofie says. “You’re talking like I don’t do this every day.”

The door opens. The air stretches taut and Sofie swears she sees the dust in the air stop for a second. Like the sun is holding its breath. She squeezes the deck between her palms and waits for the stranger to take his seat across from her. The man is looking her in the eye.

“Do you have a question for the cards?” she croaks.

People don’t usually try to look at Sofie. They don’t like to look at Mama neither, quiet and still behind her veil. Their eyes always skip around to their hands, to Sofie’s hands, to anywhere but right at her face even when she is talking to them. They listen to her read their fortunes with their eyes on the gramophone until something – usually a clumsy word from Sofie like _hierophant_ or _love_ – breaks their trance. They look at Sofie then with pity.

They look at her that way and then look away again. They don’t ask her why she reads fortunes or if she even likes reading fortunes. They don’t ask why Mama doesn’t speak to them. They don’t ask if it’s all a big trick and Mama really can walk and sing and do things that mothers are supposed to do. They don’t ask that because if it’s not a trick then there are too many more questions that they don’t want to ask.

But this man is looking at Sofie. He looks at her for a good long time, but Sofie doesn’t see those questions in him. It’s not pity. It’s something else.

“Do you have a question?” she tries again.

“What’s your name?” he says finally. It’s not a question for the cards, but it’s a question that she can answer.

“Sofie.”

“Well, Sofie, my name is Samson. I’ve heard that you’re a special kid.”

She waits and listens for Mama, but Mama is quiet.

If Samson isn’t here for a reading, are the rules still the same?

“What do you know about carnivals, Sofie?”

Mama is quiet.

“I’ve never been,” she says. “I hear there are freaks.”

Samson’s smiles like a fishhook got caught in one corner of his mouth.

“Well, sure,” he says, “some of the finest people I know are freaks.”

“It’s like this, Sofie. The world doesn’t make a whole lot of room for people like us. So we make our own room and we stick together and we’re happy. And then rubes come to us! They come to us because they see we’re happy and people got so little to be happy about these days.”

Sofie knows all about this. She and Mama stick together and people come to them all the time like sleepwalkers, slouching and sad and looking to trade two bits for something like a cure for a bad dream. She and Mama help them.

“So what do you say, Sofie? You could live with us. Imagine that: you will get to travel around with a carnival, see different towns, meet all kinds of folks. You and your mother would have a trailer of your own with your name right on the side.”

Sofie shakes her head.

“It’s Mama who reads the cards, not me.”

“Fine. Her name on the side of the trailer. The way I see it, Sofie, you’ve been doing a real good job taking care of your mother. Don’t you think it’s time that someone take care of you? We can do that. We can be a family. All you have to do is sign this here paper and we can do that for you.”

She swings her legs a little. She wishes, not for the first time, that her legs were long enough to reach the floor. Mama is quiet.

“But I can’t make you come with us,” Samson says.

 

**III**

 

She thinks she smells smoke.

Sofie’s heart hammers her awake. She remembers the wrong parts first: wrist held fast, lantern smashed, oily smoke and fire and screaming.

( _why did you hate me?_ ) 

She thinks she can hear Mama laughing.

Jonesy said going crazy was gradual-like. Little things here and there.

She remembers the night she came home and Mama’s bed was empty. She’d screamed so loud and Mama hadn’t answered. Ben had claimed that Mama had walked outside and had spoken to him and then had just collapsed out there in front of him, like he didn’t know that was impossible. If she could walk, if she could speak, why would she go to some stranger and not to her own daughter? Why would she waste voice for him and not her why would she reach out to him and not her and ( _i hate you_ ) touch him and not her?

Something has changed since then. Something snagged inside Sofie that night and torn her open along a seam, just a little bit. Something in the fabric that connected her to Mama; something in the fabric that kept her separate from Mama. She sees secrets now, but not her secrets. She sees horrible things. The past is imprinted inside her eyelids when she tries to sleep; the future transforms everything and everyone around her in bursts and flashes. It had stopped when she lost Mama and so she had blamed her for it. But now she isn’t sure it had ever really gone away.

She wants her Mama now. She wants to ask her( _why did you hate me?_ ) why this is happening to her. People used to say that Mama had one foot in one world and one in the other. She wants to ask her Mama if this is what it feels like, always existing in two places. She wants to tear everything to pieces, her own seams, the world.

Sunlight still cut between the boards. She flexes her fingers and clenches her jaw against the hurt of her hands coming back to life. Sweat pastes her hair to her lips. Her shoulder is bruised and her throat raw with dust. She’s still bound and alone, but she won’t fall asleep again.

 

**IV**

 

“You ever seen snow?”

 _Smack._ The way Jonesy throws always makes Sofie feel like the bones in her hand are being knocked apart. Sometimes she takes her mitt off and expects her hand to be smashed like a plate, but then there it always is: whole and not even cracked a little bit.

She pulls the ball out of her mitt and runs her thumb over the stitched seams. _It has veins_ , she’d said once and Jonesy’d laughed at her. She doesn’t figure them for veins anymore. They are lines, like on a palm.

“Sure,” he says, “I’ve seen snow.”

Sofie’s throw goes wide, but Jonesy makes it look loose and easy to reach for it, like catchers are _supposed_ to have to stretch and tilt that way. Jonesy had gone all over the country when he used to play ball. It’s been years on the circuit and Sofie has only seen the same towns over and over again and nothing of them, really. She sees fields and stretches of dirt on their outskirts. All fields and dirt look the same.

 

“I’ve seen snow,” Sofie says. “In Minnesota, when I was a kid. I’ve seen it, but I remember it wrong.”

What she doesn’t say is that she’d come up to this hill on her own that morning and it had started snowing like the sky had forgot there was a drought. But it wasn’t the snow like Sofie (barely) remembered from Minnesota. This snow is grey and feathery. And it didn’t melt like snow. She’d caught some in her hands and it had streaked her palms black like ash.

“How do you remember it?”

Sofie shrugs.

“Just wrong.”

She’d thought maybe if she brought Jonesy up here he’d see it, too, but it is gone now. The hill is dry and brown as anything else.

 _Smack._ She winds up for the pitch the way Jonesy had taught her, lets her arms swing long and loose and free. She turns her wrist just so. She knows before she releases the ball that it’s a perfect slider.

 _Smack_.

Jonesy doesn’t let on that Sofie’s throw was any good. She takes off her mitt.

“What’s on your mind, kid?”

She has smeared black handprints on her trouser legs. Jonesy doesn’t seem to notice but he’s a rousty: dirt and grease come with the job. She wonders if he would have noticed the mess if she’d been wearing a skirt.

“I want another driving lesson," she says. "You said I could learn by the time we were in Texas again.”

“You’re not old enough.” It’s always the same excuse. That, or: _there’s no time for that. We have a carnival to run._ Yet he always finds time to throw the ball around.

“I’m fourteen.” She’s pretty sure she’s fourteen. “That’s old enough.”

 He spits.

“Why do you want to drive for, Sofie? You planning on leaving?”

If she planned on leaving she wouldn’t need a car. She’d just choose a direction and let her feet take her toward the horizon. She’d do it someday, when Mama wouldn’t be left alone. She just couldn’t imagine when that might be.

“No.”

“Then why?”

She scuffs a cloud of fine grit into the air and felt it sift back against her. Her shoes turn grey. She can’t explain why it’s important to her. It just is. Every day Sofie gets up, she takes care of Mama, she eats alone. She waits for each day to get on enough for the carnival to wake up, so she can talk to strangers and the strangers are always the same. Jonesy has his own truck. He could leave and come back a hundred times a day if he wanted to.

If she could go into town maybe she could meet strangers who didn’t look at Sofie like she might save them.

If she could go into town maybe she could have enough room in her head for just herself.

Mama’s voice carries. Sofie can’t just ignore her; it’s like trying to ignore your own thoughts except they're not yours. Sofie has to walk right off the carnival grounds and then a little further before Mama’s voice isn’t in her skull anymore. That’s how she’d found the hill and the snow. But she could only walk so far before she felt guilty and walked back.

To say she was sorry.  
To brush Mama’s hair.  
To pick another fight because fighting felt familiar.

If she could drive maybe she could outpace her guilt.

At the carnival’s last stop Sofie had found a rabbit caught up in a snare that someone had set up and never checked. The only houses nearby were abandoned. People were moving to where there might be work and there wasn’t any work there. A snare doesn’t matter anymore when hunger isn’t the only thing starving you. Vultures and heat had made it barely a rabbit anymore. It was just husk and bones and fur starting to fill with dirt.

The rabbit could have been a meal if someone had been around to find it sooner. It could have become good dirt if the sun had been even a little bit forgiving.

She wonders if Jonesy would understand if she told him that she could taste dirt in her mouth sometimes. It's constant grit in her teeth and throat.

“I just want to help out,” she says instead. “You know, go into town, buy gas and food. That sort of stuff.”

Jonesy jams his mitt under his arm and picks at the ball’s seams. He is probably remembering, too, when Sofie used to call them veins. She used to only ask him for simple things like to play ball or to bring her back a soda from town.

“We have plenty of men who can do that sort of stuff.”

“I know. I just want to do it.”

* * *

 

In town she doesn’t have to be Sofie, so she seldom is. She is Adelaide Webster, whose pockets has been emptied and heart has been broken by some rascal she’d thought was in love with her. She is Frances Buck, a college girl heading home mid-semester to care for her mother, who is dying of dust pneumonia. She is Betty Jones, a young widow waiting in a hot car for her brother to finish his errands in town. She pieces together lives from those people who came to her for readings. She plays dress-up. Each lie feels like a stone dropped into some hollow spot inside her and swept up before it can hit bottom. Sofie doesn’t mind lies so much if they meant a little fun. No one gets hurt. Sometimes lies mean an afternoon of peace as someone else. Sometimes they mean a stranger taking pity and gifting her a soda and some kind words.

Someone notices her. She smiles. He walks away but she knows he’ll be back if she waits.

“I couldn’t help but notice you’ve been out here an awful long time.”

“Have I?”

“Yeah. About an hour and a half by my watch.”

She’s rehearsed this conversation exactly in front of her mirror. The man, Harlan Staub, recites his lines exactly as she’d written them in her head.  

"Has it been that long?" she says and he invites her into his café and brings her a drink.

When a black blizzard traps Sofie inside with him, she invents that it’s her own storm set loose.

When the lights go out she invents that it’s her doing, too.

It seems like a sign. Not that any of it feels right, but it does feel as real as the grit that gets into her dress.

What she doesn’t know is that her storm stuffed so much dust down Mama’s throat that she stopped breathing until someone found her and thumped the mud out of her chest.

 

**V**

 

_The past is the past. Just like a bad dream._

That’s what Miss Iris had said. She’d held Sofie’s face in her hands and called her a thrown-away scrap, but she’d invited Sofie into her home, Brother Justin’s home, and she’d given her a job and a new dress and a chance. Sofie doesn’t deserve this kindness, but she wants to deserve it. But she doesn’t: she’s a liar and a coward and she invites bad omens.

But despite everything they’d invited her, Iris and Brother Justin had invited her, Sofie, discarded Sofie, thrown-away Sofie, left-to-burn-by-her-own-mother Sofie, to sit at their table. To share a meal. They’d told her she was good. (But Iris had left the table, hadn’t she? _She couldn’t stand to sit with you after all._ ) Brother Justin had knelt with her, prayed with her, baptized her and told her she was treasured. ( _But he’s the one who put you here._ )

Splinters bite into Sofie’s knees. She’s pulled herself up and pressed her face to the wall, to see between the boards. There isn’t much to see. The sun is setting.

Does Iris know where Sofie is? Does she care? Does she know what Brother Justin is? Does she care?

A better question: Does Sofie know what Brother Justin is?

He’d looked at her with coal-black eyes and said that he planned on bringing hell here. She’d seen the tree tattooed on his chest. It was the tattoo she’d seen in her mother’s worst memories. She and Brother Justin were connected.

She wonders if hell can be bloodborne.

 _It’s time to choose,_ he’d said. He’d said he could free her from the bondage of her past.

And then he’d bound her wrists and locked her up.

Sofie wants to be dangerous. She wants to be strong and untouchable and whole and holy and dangerous. Then she wouldn't be here.

But she is here and she’s screaming through slats because she can hear strains of carnival sounds stretched thin and warped on the wind. She’s screaming as if someone might hear and know it is her and where to find her, trapped with her past pulling at her and something else pulling at her, too.

Because Iris is wrong. The past isn’t the past. The past is now and it’s the future and there’s no difference, not really. They bleed together.

Just like a bad dream.

 

**VI**

 

Sofie keeps walking and this time nobody comes to find her. She has nothing but herself. She’s chosen her path.

Everyone she meets seems to be headed in the same direction. Maybe they were all called by the same wind and the same voice on the radio.

Sofie doesn’t remember the first time she’d left. By all accounts she was gone for over a day but a person can’t walk that long and not remember. Ben said he’d found her barefoot and sunburnt, walking as if she had somewhere to be. He’d had to stand in front of her to make her stop walking; it was like she couldn’t see him or hear him or nothing. She doesn’t remember any of this.

She does remember being afraid to fall back asleep (she thought she smelled smoke). She remembers that her tarot cards hadn’t burned. Her trailer, Mama, everything was ash now but her cards. She remembers letting the wind scatter them. Wind doesn’t ask permission before taking and she didn’t want them anyway. They weren't her livelihood anymore. They wouldn't speak to her like they did to Mama. She remembers feeling her insides dark and boiling like a storm.

And Ben had brought her back. To what, _home_? Could a home be this place that she’d chosen as a child? Could it be this place that doesn’t have anyone who even wants her? All she has there is her ash-smeared slip, cards that wouldn’t burn and wouldn’t leave her, and people that she kept hurting over and over again. There is nothing for her there anymore.

She doesn’t blame Libby for hating her. It had taken them so long to even become friends, let alone what they’d become. The vision of her skin against Libby’s was the first thing that ever squeezed that dust storm inside of her into a warm, glowing coal. It had come true faster than she could understand it.

 _You ain’t like anybody else, are you?_ That’s what Libby had said once and Sofie could have cried. She remembers the feel Libby’s hand on her cheek, Libby’s knees night-cold against hers under the blanket, and her own heart thumping _is that good? am I good? am I good?_

Libby was the only one who had seen that there might be anything other than carnival life inside of Sofie. Libby had seen enough to pull Sofie into small worlds where they could be alone together: at the movie theatre, on the dance floor, at the bottom of a bottle of mezcal. The could have run away together, even if the cards said otherwise. She reversed the card with her own hand. She could have made her own truth.

 That’s a rule broken. Not that Sofie is counting.

 She’d thought she could hurt Libby and still have Libby love her. Libby had hurt her and she still loved her, didn’t she? Sofie saw other people hurt each other and forgive over and over again.

 But she’d said she was sorry.

 What Libby hadn’t said: that when you ain’t like anybody else, sorry isn’t enough.

 Instead of sorry, Sofie should have said _You said we’d leave this place for good, you and me._

 Instead of sorry, she should have said _I lied. I lied. I lied._

 She should have said _I still want it to be you._

And maybe Lib would have still wanted it to be Sofie. And maybe she’d still want to leave and spite the cards. They would have driven away together — Sofie at the wheel — everything they owned strapped to the top of a car, the sun and moon on the car doors painted over with mud so no one would know where they’d come from. They would have slept in the backseat until they’d found an apartment, something small and tidy and full of light above a coffee shop. They’d have swum in the ocean and they’d have sneaked into pictures together. Libby would’ve been discovered one day while they were walking down the street. She would’ve been a star and Sofie would’ve been her secret and they would’ve been happy.

Sofie knows it’s a bitter dream and one she is best to let go. She’d hurt Libby and and she’d hurt Jonesy and somehow that’d pushed them together and far away from her. At least maybe they’ll both be happy.

And Jonesy. Jonesy hates her and doesn’t hate her enough. She doesn’t mind that he doesn’t want her working with the roustabouts and other labourers. She knows that she’s not as strong as the rest of them. She knows that she doesn’t belong. He’s too soft to really punish her with work, but she doesn’t mind that either. She couldn’t read cards for rubes anymore, not without Mama, not without seeing things she didn’t want to reveal to strangers. She couldn’t work the way she had worked her whole life and she needed to fill herself with work. And as long as no one stopped her, and Jonesy didn’t, not really, she could work until all that was left to her was work.  Every bolt she’d tightened until her palms split was penance. Every shovelful of dirt that she’d torn muscles to lift was an act of contrition. When every part of her hurt it was easier to not hear Mama in her head.

She’d slept on the ground

because she didn’t want to sleep.  
because her new bed had ghosts.  
because she thought she smelled smoke.  
because it was safe.  
because that’s what she deserved.

This time she was leaving by her own choice and she was determined to remember it.

Her head was clear now. Ben had put his hands on her and the storm inside her had quieted. It was different from what she'd had with Libby, there was no warm coal in her gut. She was emptied. The heat and the wind and the sand were gone. Mama’s voice was gone.

“What did you do?”

Ben couldn’t give her an answer, but she was grateful anyway.

It had rained that night. The thunder had come from her and it had rolled through her. She’d let her storm out and it had opened up the skies. Everyone had left to secure the tents but Sofie had stayed behind.  She’d stood in the mud and listened to the rain and the radio. Dust couldn’t exist in so much rain.

 _Let the wicked man forsake his ways_ , the radio had said, and Sofie’d stopped her rain to listen.

_You will be saved, before you even know it, like a child being born._

She could be saved. That's why she is walking: she is going to be saved.

 

**VII**

 

There’s someone in the shed with her. Sofie isn’t sure if that someone is a vision or a trick of light and shadow or a real human being sitting in a chair.

“Mama?”

She hopes that it’s Mama. She’s afraid that it is her.

She can almost feel the grain of her cards under her fingers. In her mind she shuffles the deck, relaxing into the familiar shushing of her cards sliding against each other, deciding their places. She is just a person with questions that need answering. She knows the simple five-card spread she’d deal and what hidden meanings Mama would place on her tongue like wafers. Like coins.

First card: High Priestess. She’s ready for her power and to find her place. It sings in her blood if she’ll listen to it. She can unleash storms.  

Mama hasn’t moved.

Second card: The Tower. Sofie sees the flames on the card and she smells smoke. She feels the hairs on her arms singe. She feels a hand tighten around her wrist. Flames eat up her room and Mama holds her fast. She's known what Sofie is all along. She'd tried to protect her. She'd tried to stop her from becoming. The smoke is choking her. 

“Stop!” Sofie screams. Like she could tell time to stop. Like she could tell fire to stop. Like she could tell herself to stop.

Third Card: Judgment.

It’s time to choose.  
It’s time to choose.  
It’s time to choose.

Sofie is panting. The flames are gone. She is in the shed. Mama swivels the chair to face her.

Fourth Card: Nine of Swords. This is why she’s here. This is what she deserves. For her guilt. For her sins.

“Mama?”

The stranger rises. Sofie falls and scrabbles back until her back is against a beam. Her ropes cut into her wrists.

Fifth card: Le Passeur. The twenty-third card of the Major Arcana. The card that doesn’t exist and could only be meant for her. She doesn’t know what it means.

The stranger is close enough to kiss Sofie. It’s wearing Mama’s black dress and veil, but Sofie is certain now that it isn’t Mama. She’s been certain for a while.

“Please,” Sofie says. She tries to turn her face away but the stranger holds her face in its hand. Forces her to look into her own face. Sofie sees herself with her eyes blacked away, like Brother Justin’s had been. Something marked. Something inhuman. It doesn’t smile.

“This is your house.”

**VIII**

 

This is what Sofie knows: the carnival is leaving without her.

Samson yells “Let’s shake some dust” and rousties throw their last packs into the trucks and tie down the loads, and doors slam shut and engines shudder to life, and no one is thinking about her.

She is thinking about every one of them. They are her home and they are not her home.

She is standing in a cornfield and it is her house. So are the fields beyond it and the migrant camp and the dirt roads grinding beneath the trucks and trailers. So is wherever the carnival is going and everything their circuit will never reach. This is her house.

She watches them leave without her, but they can’t leave her anymore.

She can pour life like lemonade into a glass. She has to take it first, but it’s hers to take so she takes it without asking. The leaves brushing her arms wilt and blacken. The stalks bend and bow around her. Corn silk turns to rot. No one looks out at the fields as they drive away, but if they had, they might have seen her standing alone and exposed. They would not have seen Brother Justin at her feet.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Please kudos + comment if you enjoyed!


End file.
